4,761 research outputs found
A Sociolinguistic Approach to Security Challenges and Sustainable National Development in Nigeria
The study is a sociolinguistic approach to solving security challenges and enhancing sustainable national development in Nigeria. It argues that language and society influences each other and as such language could be used to solve societal problems. In doing so, the paper x-rays the functions of language in human society as propounded by Halliday and Stubbs. It discusses the multilingual nature of Nigeria, the concept of national development as well as security challenges facing the country. The paper notes that the dominant use English language against the indigenous languages in nearly all communicative domains in Nigeria has failed the nation in its bid to overcome numerous security threats. This may not be unconnected with the low literacy level in the country. As a result, the paper recommends a tripartite language policy vis-Ă -vis the use of English language, the indigenous languages as well as the Nigerian Pidgin depending on the contextual demand. The paper also advocates the adoption of more indigenous languages, apart from the three major ones- Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, for use. This will imply a revision of Nigeria's language policy and the constitutional provisions on language
An XML-based Tool for Tracking English Inclusions in German Text
The use of lexicons and corpora advances both linguistic research and performances of current natural language processing (NLP) systems. We present a tool that exploits such resources, specifically English and German lexical databases and the World Wide Web to recognise English inclusions in German newspaper articles. The output of the tool can assist lexical resource developers in monitoring changing patterns of English inclusion usage. The corpus used for the classification covers three different domains. We report the classification results and illustrate their value to linguistic and NLP research
Teaching English for medical translation: a corpus-based approach
Developing the appropriate linguistic and documentation skills in specialised domains is one of the greatest challenges in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses. Among other tools, corpora are intended as efficient resources students can use to improve and develop their thematic, terminological, and phraseological knowledge (SĂĄnchez Ramos, 2020). Based on a non-experimental mixed-methods study, this paper reports the feasibility of a corpus-based approach to teaching medical translation at a postgraduate level. It analyses how a group of 40 postgraduate students at the University of AlcalĂĄ (Madrid, Spain) perceive the compilation of their own corpus and the usefulness of corpus management tools (CMTs) in solving thematic, terminological, and phraseological issues. The software LancsBox (Lancaster University) was used, which is a recently created CMT that incorporates automatic tagging, cutting-edge statistics information, and innovative visualization options. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of this data suggest that the ESP students were highly satisfied with the corpus-based approach. Our findings also reveal that postgraduate students incorporated CMTs during the whole course as documentation resources for their translation tasks, and they are willing to use them in their near future professional career. These results show the potential usefulness of CMTs and offer a way of integrating them into the ESP curriculum
Translation of Pronominal Anaphora between English and Spanish: Discrepancies and Evaluation
This paper evaluates the different tasks carried out in the translation of
pronominal anaphora in a machine translation (MT) system. The MT interlingua
approach named AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation)
improves upon other proposals presented to date because it is able to translate
intersentential anaphors, detect co-reference chains, and translate Spanish
zero pronouns into English---issues hardly considered by other systems. The
paper presents the resolution and evaluation of these anaphora problems in AGIR
with the use of different kinds of knowledge (lexical, morphological,
syntactic, and semantic). The translation of English and Spanish anaphoric
third-person personal pronouns (including Spanish zero pronouns) into the
target language has been evaluated on unrestricted corpora. We have obtained a
precision of 80.4% and 84.8% in the translation of Spanish and English
pronouns, respectively. Although we have only studied the Spanish and English
languages, our approach can be easily extended to other languages such as
Portuguese, Italian, or Japanese
Lost in translation: the problems of using mainstream MT evaluation metrics for sign language translation
In this paper we consider the problems of applying corpus-based techniques to minority languages that are neither politically recognised nor have a formally accepted writing system, namely sign languages. We discuss the adoption of an annotated form of sign language data as a suitable corpus for the development of a data-driven machine translation (MT) system, and deal with issues that arise from its use. Useful software tools that facilitate easy annotation of video data are also discussed. Furthermore, we address the problems of using traditional MT evaluation metrics for sign language translation. Based on the candidate translations produced from our example-based machine translation system, we discuss why standard metrics fall short of providing an accurate evaluation and suggest more suitable evaluation methods
A multi-level methodology for the automated translation of a coreference resolution dataset: an application to the Italian language
In the last decade, the demand for readily accessible corpora has touched all areas of natural language processing, including
coreference resolution. However, it is one of the least considered sub-fields in recent developments. Moreover, almost all
existing resources are only available for the English language. To overcome this lack, this work proposes a methodology to
create a corpus for coreference resolution in Italian exploiting knowledge of annotated resources in other languages.
Starting from OntonNotes, the methodology translates and refines English utterances to obtain utterances respecting Italian
grammar, dealing with language-specific phenomena and preserving coreference and mentions. A quantitative and qualitative
evaluation is performed to assess the well-formedness of generated utterances, considering readability, grammaticality,
and acceptability indexes. The results have confirmed the effectiveness of the methodology in generating a good
dataset for coreference resolution starting from an existing one. The goodness of the dataset is also assessed by training a
coreference resolution model based on BERT language model, achieving the promising results. Even if the methodology
has been tailored for English and Italian languages, it has a general basis easily extendable to other languages, adapting a
small number of language-dependent rules to generalize most of the linguistic phenomena of the language under
examination
Japanese/English Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Exploration of Query Translation and Transliteration
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queries and documents are
in different languages, has of late become one of the major topics within the
information retrieval community. This paper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR
system, where we combine a query translation and retrieval modules. We
currently target the retrieval of technical documents, and therefore the
performance of our system is highly dependent on the quality of the translation
of technical terms. However, the technical term translation is still
problematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thus new
terms are progressively created by combining existing base words. In addition,
Japanese often represents loanwords based on its special phonogram.
Consequently, existing dictionaries find it difficult to achieve sufficient
coverage. To counter the first problem, we produce a Japanese/English
dictionary for base words, and translate compound words on a word-by-word
basis. We also use a probabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For
the second problem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds words
unlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents in the
target language. We evaluate our system using a test collection for CLIR, and
show that both the compound word translation and transliteration methods
improve the system performance
THE APPLICATION OF FUNCTIONAL APPROACH IN STANDAR KOMPETENSI LULUSAN (SKL) UJIAN NASIONAL SMP/MTs OF ENGLISH IN ACADEMIC YEAR 2011 â 2012
Ujian Nasional (UN) or national examination for the ninth grader of Junior High School has
been conducted. Each subject tested has its own competency standard for the graduation or
standar kompetensi lulusan (SKL). SKL is used as the assessment standard to determine the
graduation of the students. The SKL for Ujian Nasional (UN) SMP/MTs of English in
academic year 2011 - 2012 covers competency in reading and writing skill. This writing
shows that competencies and the indicators of the SKL Ujian Nasional (UN) SMP/MTs of
English in academic year 2011 - 2012 reflect functional approach in English Language
Teaching
Under-explicit and minimally explicit reference: Evidence from a longitudinal case study
This chapter reports on a 2 ½ year longitudinal case study of one Korean speaker of English, focusing on the development of her command of accessibility marking in referring to persons. The data are derived from informal, open interviews spanning the entire length of the participantâs enrolment in a Bachelor of Nursing programme in New Zealand. These interviews occurred every few weeks during semester (17 in total), and were typically between 45 minutes to one hour in length. The participant reported that she used these interviews as âa kind of reflective journalâ, in which she discussed her classes, interactions with classmates, tutors and others, her assignments, and other experiences in New Zealand. The events she reported are rich in references to individuals.
Using a previously reported coding scheme (Ryan, 2015), these data were analysed in relation to pragmatic felicity, particularly concerning the felicity of accessibility marking for referents of varying cognitive status in contexts of topic or focus continuity or shift. These data [yet to be analysed] provide evidence of the developmental progression of the participantâs command of reference in English.
This chapter contributes substantially to the literature in several ways. In general, there has been a lack of longitudinal case studies of pragmatic development in any domain, including few â if any â previous longitudinal studies focusing on reference; the present analysis is therefore expected to reveal previously unreported details of the trajectory of pragmatic development in reference. The present study is also one of the few working with oral data that was generated in ways other than an elicited communication task. Finally, the study contributes to the somewhat still contentious issue of to what extent mainstream study in an English-speaking context leads to genuine language gains
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